It was a sunny day for outdoor gym class at Bexley's Montrose Elementary School, but when the
kids were summoned into the building, third-grader Brittney Harder sensed that something was
wrong.

"All the teachers and the administrators were crying, and we didn't know what was going on,"
said Harder, now 17 and a senior at Upper Arlington High School, as she recalled the Sept. 11,
2001, attack.

"I just remember not really understanding and being scared. I'd never seen my teachers cry over
anything."

With the attack still unfolding live on TV, nobody yet knew when it would stop. The World Trade
Center and the Pentagon were in flames, and a jet hijacked above Cleveland crashed about 80 miles
southeast of Pittsburgh.

"We had to go in our classrooms and sit under our desks until our parents came," Harder
recalled.

Today's high-school students were raised with Osama bin Laden as the face of terrorism, experts
say. Students across Franklin County were processing the news yesterday that the man who
masterminded the attacks had been shot dead by Navy SEALs in a daring raid in Pakistan.

"This is a generation of children for whom their understanding of the world has been largely
shaped and formed by Osama bin Laden," said Katherine Cowan, director of communications for the
National Association of School Psychologists. "For this age group of kids, this is a major event
because it is directly related to their beginning understanding of the U.S. as a country that is
part of a bigger world."

Evan Winters, a sophomore at the eSTEM Academy in Reynoldsburg High School, spent yesterday
morning talking to his fellow students about the news, unsure how to feel.

"The whole hugeness of the situation is still something that is hard to understand," said
Winters, 16, who was in the first grade in September 2001.

He remembers watching the news at home, confused about what had happened, after his father
pulled him out of school. He said he started to understand the events of Sept. 11 years later, when
his school held moments of silence on the anniversary of the attack.

"People may be happy, but when you start to think about it, you don't know if it's a real reason
to rejoice," Winters said of bin Laden's death.

Many students are worried that retaliatory attacks will be next.

"I told my mom, and she said: 'Wow, this could be a really good thing or a really bad thing,'"
said Ava Cramp, 18, a senior at Upper Arlington.

Reynoldsburg High School sophomore Jodeci Acosta-Gorman first learned about bin Laden's death on
Facebook and Twitter and spent the night on the phone with a friend while watching the news.

In her social-studies class yesterday, she and her classmates watched President Barack Obama's
speech and wrote a journal entry about it.

Although she said she's relieved that bin Laden is dead, she's concerned about the
aftermath.

"It could be the start of something," said Acosta-Gorman, 16, who also attends the school's
eSTEM Academy. "I don't want another war to start."

"It doesn't end the war on terror," said Alex West, 18, also a senior at Upper Arlington, "but
it closes one door that's been open for 91/2, 10 years."